Healing and Reconciliation: Highlights

Healing and Reconciliation require the help of bystanders
by Ervin Staub, 6/7/96

Nations and the community of nations at times support perpetrators and at times continue normal relations with them. Most often they remain passive in the course of increasing violence against ethnic, racial, religious or political groups. This gives
perpetrators confidence and even leads them to believe that the rest of the world supports their actions. To prevent genocide it is essential for "bystander nations" to react early, with strong statements of disapproval, by withholding
aid, with boycotts and sanctions if necessary.

But even following genocidal violence bystander nations have essential roles to fulfill. After the hesitation, wavering and hand-wringing which allowed the continuation of violence in Bosnia, the actions of NATO and the U.S. at the end were unusual and
precedent setting. The commitment they expressed ought to be extended now in ways that will help the people of Bosnia an the region and create new historical precedents. The help offered must go beyond economic support. . . .

Should we "intervene" in these ways in the "internal affairs" of people in Bosnia? How do we in the U.S. get our leaders to attend to these human dimensions, which are the essential requisites of peace? What are the specifics that
ought to be done, and who should do them?

Healing and reconciling by promoting a change of consciousness
by Mario Kamenetzky, 6/16/96

Almost twenty years ago, I was in Sri Lanka, a country torn by war between two ethnic groups, the Buddhist Sinhaleses and the Hindu Tamils. As the Science and Technology Specialist of the World Bank, I was exploring ways for increasing efficiency in the
transfer of technical resources to the poorest sectors of a country's population. . . .

My field experience told me more than just about effective economic development at the village level. Tamils and Sinhaleses were working together, in peace and with joy. . . . Outside those villages, Sinhaleses and Tamils were programmed into seeing one
group in competition with the other, a competition that could only end by separating spaces, or by one group dominating over the other. . . .

Whenever there is a conflict, whether in Bosnia or elsewhere, bystanders pay little attention to the mind-set of people and leaders. They may try to create ethnically pure zones, often forgetting that, previously, those ethnic groups were sharing the
land and its resources for many years. Apart from ever-present Capulet/Montague type of fights, close contact among cultures usually leads to the development of some sort of conviviality, until religious and political leaders start poisoning
peoples minds. It comes to my mind tenth-century Spain, when wise Muslims and Jews rose above the prevailing structures of consciousness of their time and built an island of cultural tolerance and economic progress in Cordoba. Both sides
used their respective religion to develop community values and relink their people with the wisdom of nature, not as a divisive instrument of conquest and oppression. Muslims received a broad humanistic education, and Jews, as one scholar
says, 'combined Torah, Greek wisdom, and poetry. . . .

Seldom, if ever, do bystander nations and international organizations worry about the kind of enculturation that people and leaders of the factions at war have received from their educational institutions. The paths to peace will remain uncertain while
people's minds continue to be programmed into believing that their god is superior to the god of the others. War crimes will continue for as long as males are programmed to see females as inferior beings, who cannot be anything else
but property under the control of males, and who, when they belong to another ethnic, religious, national, or ideological group, could be raped in war as another way of hurting the male enemies. There will always be humans ready to fight
if the mind is programmed to see the body as a seat of the devil, and to think that it can be redeemed only through either hard work, or destruction in an act of war.

Is There a Truth About the Balkan Conflict?
by A. Dey, 6/23/96

While reading the contradictory interpretations of the conflicts in the Balkans in this century, one is inclined to accept that truth is relative (a notion often entertained by undergraduate philosophy students, as Allan Bloom once noted).

The "relativity of truth" thesis becomes even more persuasive if one conducts interviews with random samples of Serbs, Croats and (Bosnian) Muslims and attempts to find out what really happened between 1991 and 1995. The accounts of the events
and the interpretations of the causes of the conflict differ dramatically.

There is, however, one theme which constantly comes up in interviews with Bosnian and Croatian Serbs: their suffering at the hands of the Croats and Muslims during the Second World War. Most of the people I talked to claimed that the Holocaust is not
distant history, but something they or their parents and grandparents experienced themselves. Almost every Bosnian or Croatian Serb I talked to had lost at least one close relative (parent, brother, sister, grandparent, son or daughter)
in Croatian extermination camps. . . .

Although Serbian excesses in the 1991-1995 war should not be excused by the Holocaust, Serb fear of a repetition of a Croat/Muslim genocide were not without grounds, since reconciliation did not take place after the Second World War. No Croatian or Muslim
politician ever went to an extermination camp to declare that the Holocaust was a disgrace for the entire Croatian and Muslim nation or that he or she asks the victims for forgiveness (some Yugoslav intellectuals say (perhaps rightly)
that, even without a formal request for forgiveness, the Serbs should have been able to forgive and forget the Holocaust). On the contrary, the victims were often accused in one way or another of provoking the genocide. That sort of attitude
was of course a perfect basis for a new conflict. After the collapse of the Yugoslav authoritarian regime, this new conflict started in 1991. And since the Yugoslav peoples were not used to approach their past in a critical way, all excesses
in the latest war were justified in the eyes of many of the perpetrators' compatriots (something we can see in this NYT forum as well).

We have to conclude, then, that the truth about Balkan conflicts is not relative. But to learn the non-relative truth, one needs to dig a lot (more than a journalist is often able to). For a genuine reconciliation of the peoples from former Yugoslavia,
a non-relative truth has to be accepted by the Yugoslav peoples themselves. Before that happens (and I do not see it happening in the foreseeable future), Croats, Serbs and Muslims will have to live in separate states. Although such a
prospect is contrary to our values, it seems at least to be a guarantee against renewed ethnic war.